Why You're Busy, But Never Getting Ahead
The 80/20 rule for your day, and why most people have the ratio completely backwards.
Ultimate frisbee is kind of a big deal in our house. Has been for a while.
Both of my kids played through high school. My daughter is all in during her college years and she is amazing. And my son? He was incredible. The athleticism, the field vision, the instincts. If he had wanted to pursue it, I have no doubt he could have played at the highest level.
But early in his college career, he sorta did the math. Ultimate doesn’t pay scholarships and NIL money is more or less nonexistent for fringe sports. Plus the stress and anxiety that came with the intense competition wasn’t counter balanced enough by the joy of the game. Basically, Ultimate is a labor of love and man you gotta love it.
So he made a choice and he more or less put it aside. He still plays for fun now and then, still shows up when it sounds good. But it isn’t a driving force in his life.
What he did, without calling it this, was sort the signal from the noise. He looked at everything competing for his time and attention, ran it through a filter, and decided where to point his life.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. In part because I stumbled on a headline about Kevin O’Leary talking about exactly this. Yes, that Kevin O’Leary, Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank. The one who kind of bugs me. But love him or hate him, the man has been successful, and sometimes you can learn a lot from people you don’t necessarily like.
So this week, let’s talk about signal vs. noise, what it is, why it matters, and how you can tell the difference.
An Ever So Nerdy Concept
If you hang around technical people long enough, sooner or later someone is going to mention signal-to-noise ratio. It comes up in audio engineering, in wireless communications, in data science. Basically anywhere you’re trying to pull something useful out of a lot of interference. Some goodie goodie with an engineering background cracks their knuckles and says “well, we’ve gotta separate the signal from the noise.” I find it somewhat pretentious and I cannot believe it is what I am writing about this week, but here we are.
Anyway, the concept goes something like this. The signal is what you want. The noise is everything getting in the way. Kevin O’Leary (to his credit) took the idea and applied it to something more useful than radio waves. He applied it to your day.
Kevin says, every morning, you have a very short list of things that actually matter. The three to five tasks that, if you get them done, move your work or your life forward in a meaningful way. That’s your signal. Everything else, the meetings that could have been emails, the notifications, the rabbit holes, the low-stakes busy work, well that’s noise.
It’s not even really his idea. He credits a lot of it to time spent around Steve Jobs. And if you’ve read anything about how Jobs operated, this makes sense. Jobs was famous for saying no to almost everything. He ran Apple with a ruthlessly short list of priorities. The company made very few products. He had very few meetings. He wore the same dang black turtleneck and jeans every day. Every one of those choices was about protecting the signal.
The idea isn’t that noise is evil or that you can eliminate it entirely. It’s that most of us have the ratio backwards. We spend our best hours on the noise and wonder why the signal never gets through.
Why You’re Busy But Never Quite Done
You ever spend time on the Productivity subreddit? No? Just me?
It’s a community of over four million people, which makes it one of the larger corners of Reddit. And if you wander over there, you will notice something pretty quickly. Post after post after post about motivation. About staying focused. About what to do when everything feels like too much.
And sure there are responses about systems or tools or workflows. And there are plenty of productivity gurus to go around. Hell, I wander into those waters in my writing frequently. But what is interesting to me is seeing people post essentially about survival. “Why can’t I make myself start?” “I know what I need to do but I can’t do it.” “I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know where to begin.”
Four million people, and a huge chunk of them are just trying to figure out what to focus on and where to start.
If you ask me, that is the noise winning.
We live in an environment that is almost perfectly designed to destroy focus. Your phone is engineered to interrupt you and your inbox refills the second you empty it. Meetings get scheduled in the middle of your best thinking hours. The mental laundry is never clean and folded. And somewhere in all of that, you’re supposed to find the clarity and energy to do work that actually moves the needle.
Most of us don’t.
Not because we’re lazy or undisciplined. But because we’ve never figured out what the signal actually is. When everything feels urgent, nothing feels manageable. And when nothing feels manageable, motivation doesn’t stand a chance.
It feels like being busy. It feels like a full calendar and an empty sense of progress. And it feels like falling into bed exhausted and still not being sure you actually did anything.
How to Turn Down the Noise
Okay, so what do we actually do here?
O’Leary’s framework isn’t complicated. He says successful people maintain an 80/20 ratio. Eighty percent of their time and energy goes to the signal. Twenty percent is the unavoidable noise that just comes with being alive in the 2020s. He argues that anyone whose ratio slips to 50/50 is basically screwed. Not because they’re lazy, but because they lost the plot.
Thankfully, you don’t need a productivity app or a life coach to get things sorted. You need about ten minutes and a piece of paper. And discipline. Lots and lots of discipline. Let me explain:
Figure out your signals. Every morning, write down the three to five things that actually need to happen today. Not your full task list. Not your whole dang inbox. The things that, if you get them done, you can honestly say you moved something forward. That’s your signal list. Fiercely protect it. Discipline moment number 1.
Name your noise. Most of us know our biggest distractions, but we rarely say them out loud. Write these down too. The meetings that eat your week alive. The apps you open out of habit. The stuff you do because it feels productive without actually being productive. Naming them takes away some of their power.
Protect your best hours. Your signal deserves your sharpest thinking. It is all too tempting to surrender your best hours to email and your worst hours to deep work. Flip this. Block time for your signals before the noise has a chance to fill in. It’s tough to do. Discipline moment number 2. If you can make chunks of time non-negotiable, it will feel like a superpower.
Check your ratio. At the end of the day, ask yourself honestly: where did most of my energy go? You don’t need to be perfect, just be honest. If the ratio is slipping, you know what needs some course correction.
You cannot eliminate noise entirely. Some of it is truly unavoidable, some of it is actually useful. But the goal is to stop letting it run roughshod over your life.
In Conclusion
My son graduated from the University of Washington (go Huskies!) last June. He has a great job, strong relationships, and is about as grounded as a 22-year-old can be. My wife and I are genuinely in awe of how well he is living his life. Lord knows I was not this put together at his age.
But he’s always been like this. Pragmatic and passionate in equal measure.
When he was six years old, he cornered us on Santa Claus. Something just wasn’t adding up for him. How did Santa travel the whole world? How did he decide who got presents? What was the timeline? We finally relented and, as gently as we could, broke the spell. Santa was more of a concept than a person.
He was actually relieved.
The whole thing was noise to him. And once it was out of the way, he was free to just enjoy Christmas for what it actually was. And he was six years old. Like...how? I am pretty sure I held onto Santa until my mid-teens.
It’s always amazed me that he could do that. Look at a situation, run it through some internal filter, and figure out what made sense for him and what didn’t. From Santa Claus to Ultimate Frisbee and everything in between.
Most of us aren’t wired that way. But it’s a skill you can build. You can start tomorrow morning. Write down your three to five signals. Call out the noise. Make your best hours non-negotiable. Check your ratio at the end of the day. Stay disciplined.
The signal is there. You just have to clear out enough noise to hear it. Damn, those nerdy engineers were right.
Ever Forward,
— Derek (aka Chief Rabbit)
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